1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic montage composing apparatus for composing a picture of a human face and the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
An electronic apparatus with a montage composing function has been put to practical use, which is used to store data of a name card, and is further used to compose and store a portrait of a person.
In such an electronic apparatus with a montage composing function, several sorts of component parts for composing a portrait or a human face montage are prepared and memorized in a part memory. These component parts include eye parts, nose parts, mouth parts, eyebrow parts, face-outline parts and hair-style parts and the like. When a portrait is composed, appropriate component parts are selectively read out from the part memory, and are combined on a display unit to compose a portrait. Conventionally, a desired pattern of a component part is selected from among the component parts memorized in the part memory, and component parts of desired patterns are combined to compose the portrait. More specifically, component parts of desired patterns are selected one by one from among the memorized component parts in order of, for example, a face-outline part, a hair-style part, an eyebrow part, an eye part and so on, and are successively combined into a montage.
In the conventional apparatus with a montage composing function, a part selecting key is operated at first to select a sort of component parts which compose a particular portion of a portrait. Then a pattern selecting key is operated to select a desired pattern of the selected component part from the component parts of the sort which is selected by operation of the part selecting key. In this manner, the part selecting key and the pattern selecting key are alternatively operated for selecting appropriate component parts to compose a portrait or a human face montage. As described above, with the conventional apparatus, the part selecting key and the pattern selecting key must be operated to compose the montage from the very first on the display unit, on which nothing is displayed. Therefore, it will take much of time to complete a montage of a desired human face. In addition, since no reference is prepared for selecting component parts of desired patterns from among a plurality of component parts, the part selecting key and the pattern selecting key are often operated in error. Accordingly, with the conventional electronic apparatus, it is almost impossible to precisely compose a desired montage in a short time.